Abstract
In this paper, a quantum identity authentication protocol is presented based on the counterfactual quantum key distribution system. Utilizing the proposed protocol, two participants can verify each other’s identity through the counterfactual quantum communication system. The security of the protocol is proved against individual attacks. Furthermore, according to the characteristics of the counterfactual quantum key distribution system, we propose an authenticated counterfactual quantum key distribution protocol based on a novel strategy of mixing the two types of quantum cryptographic protocols randomly. The authenticated quantum key distribution can also be used to update the extent of the authentication keys.
Highlights
Quantum mechanics has produced immense influence in information security
We first propose a quantum identity authentication protocol that can be realized in the counterfactual quantum communication system
In this authenticated counterfactual quantum key distribution (QKD) protocol, the two independent processes of QKD and quantum identity authentication (QIA) mixed randomly for any third party except the two participants, the adversaries cannot discriminate between a QIA signal and a QKD signal
Summary
Quantum mechanics has produced immense influence in information security. The widely used public key cryptography algorithms such as the RSA public key algorithm are facing serious threat of quantum computation [1]. QKD protocols have been proposed utilizing different quantum coding technologies, as well as the other types of quantum cryptographic protocol, such as quantum secure direct communication [6,7,8,9,10,11], quantum secret sharing [12,13,14,15,16,17], quantum private querying [18,19,20,21,22,23] and so on [24,25,26]. We propose a quantum identity authentication (QIA) protocol that can be used in the counterfactual QKD protocol to identify the communication parties. Due to the characteristics of the counterfactual quantum communication technology, the combined processes of the counterfactual QKD protocol and the proposed QIA protocol can be used to extend the length of authentication keys with almost arbitrary expanded proportion.
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